Post Tikka
by garfieldodie
Summary: Series 7. The Cat isn't as stupid as he looks...


The Cat was feeling very pleased for the moment. He'd slept three times and ate five times. Now it was time to see about that seam on his suit that had broken. He meandered his way out of the cockpit and headed into Mid Ships, looking around the room for a needle and some thread.

But then he smelled something a bit off. A weird smell that was quickly becoming familiar to him.

The entire trip throughout time and space because Lister screwed up time and almost killed everyone because he wanted a curry had reeked of this smell. That smell was the smell he'd smelt whenever they time-jumped and ended up somewhere new. The Cat didn't fully understand how it worked. All he knew was that too much of this activity would one day turn him into a fat balding git who thought plaid was cool.

The Cat had despised his future self. And he loved himself too much to risk becoming him. He was honest-to-god _hoping _it wasn't _him _who was arriving.

But it wasn't.

It was someone who the Cat didn't except at all.

It was Lister.

Not the future brain-in-a-jar Lister, no.

It was the present Lister, who was wearing the right clothes and looking the right way.

Well…right in a Lister sort of way, the Cat decided.

But Lister was more curry-stained than usual. He looked terrible. He looked sleep-deprived and more than a little sick, but he was also cackling slightly.

"Bud…?" the Cat asked curiously.

"ACK!" Lister shrieked, jumping backwards slightly. But when he saw it was the Cat, he relaxed quite a bit, and he laughed through his sigh of relief. "Cat, man, it's only you."

"_Only_ me?" the Cat repeated, offended. "You're lucky you smell worse than an airplane seat's cushion, or else I'd have to teach you a lesson."

"Sure, man, sure, sure," Lister replied dismissively, trying to get his bearings back as he clutched the Time Drive.

Cat finally couldn't stand it.

"Bud, what precisely are you doing?"

Lister looked confused for a second, but then he realized as he hefted the Time Drive in his hands. "Oh well, Rimmer just played a great big practical joke on me," he replied.

"Did he?" the Cat asked.

"Yeah, you've probably noticed by now that _Starbug'_s detachable end has floated off on its own."

Cat's face scrunched up. "The ship can break in two?"

Lister stared at him for a moment shaking his head. "It's supposed to be for safety. For example, if the ship is weighted down and we need to get out in a hurry, we can just snap off the back end and scamper off, but it'd leave us with little food, supplies or fuel."

"Huh."

"And Rimmer just had the _great_ idea of trapping me in that section and leaving me behind!"

Cat's eyebrows rose. "Did he now?" he asked.

"Yeah! And I'd just gotten my curry supplies back to!"

"How'd you do that?"

"Well, see, it turns out they weren't destroyed in the flood. All I had to do was go back to the past and bring all the curry supplies to the present. They're all still sitting there in the other half waiting to be brought aboard. I just need to find a way to reconnect the two halves."

"So why don't you?"

Lister winced, clutching his stomach.

"Because I downed four crates worth in one go and I _really_ need to get the smeg to a bathroom."

Cat backed away from him nervously. "Man, you must be sitting atop a human Hiroshima."

"Hold this, I've gotta find the restroom," Lister said, shoving the Time Drive into Cat's hands and walking around frantically.

"How long have you been trapped out there anyway?" Cat asked, looking the device over.

"Oh, just under a day. I came back to the point where _Starbug's _only been separated for a few minutes."

"So you just zapped yourself back once you had to use the restroom?"

"Yeah, pretty clever, eh?" Lister said, grinning proudly as he turned to race up the stairs.

"Yeah, really clever!" the Cat replied, grinning back. "Oh, Bud? One thing."

Lister stopped on the stairs and looked back over his shoulder.

"Yeah, what's that?"

The Cat lifted the Time Drive and pointed it at Lister, and Lister vanished in a field of red.

"That," he said to nothing, grinning proudly to himself.

At that moment, Rimmer and Kryten walked into the room from the hatchway beside the galley (no one was sure where it had come from). They had seen the whole thing.

"Well done, Cat," Rimmer said, sounding very pleased.

"Yeah, well…," Cat said, for once being modest.

Rimmer strode over and took the Time Drive from Cat, and they high-fived each other and gave a celebratory cat shriek that would've made Little Richard wince.

Kryten watched unsurely.

"So what do we do with that thing?" Cat asked.

"Well, I'm not up for going through a bunch of reality mindfields just to put this back, and I'd rather not flush it into space for someone else to misuse it, so we'll lock it up in the vault until we need it for a _genuine _emergency, and then _only _as a last resort."

"Reading you on FM!"

"But sirs, what about Mr Lister?" Kryten wailed.

"We'll go back for him in about week, once he's learned his lesson," Rimmer assured him.

"Yeah, but I ain't stepping foot in that cargo bay until we've washed it down. I've got a feeling it's gonna stink in there something awful," the Cat said grimly.

END


End file.
